Baruj Benacerraf

Baruj Benacerraf was a Venezuelan-born immunologist who built his career in the United States. He was born in Caracas on October 29, 1920, spent part of his childhood in Paris, and emigrated to the United States in 1940, studying at Columbia University and taking his medical degree at the Medical College of Virginia. After United States Army service he began in immunology in the laboratory of Elvin Kabat at Columbia, worked in Paris on the reticuloendothelial system, and then set up his own laboratory at New York University, later working at the National Institutes of Health and at Harvard Medical School, where he became Fabyan Professor of comparative pathology. His studies of why inbred animals divide into responders and non-responders to certain antigens led him to the immune response genes, part of the major histocompatibility complex. For this work he shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jean Dausset and George Davis Snell. He died in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on August 2, 2011.